Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid Lynx On Vaio VPCEA36FG

Due to a sudden death of my beloved M300, I’m back in the market for a new laptop. And despite the bad news I have been hearing right and left, I’m sticking to yet another notebook with ATI discrete graphic chip, this time the ATI HD5650 😀

My wallet voted for Sony Vaio VPCEA36FG, a much higher specced unit than the M300, but comes with less gimmick. From my research the E series of the Vaio family doesn’t play nice with Linux/Ubuntu. But the spec was so good..and I just had to 😀 Well, it is cheap. What I miss:

a dedicated volume rocker. Volume is controlled with Fn+Fx button combos, which sadly refuse to respond when I’m playing a session of World of Goo

I don’t like chiclet keyboard, especially the one that comes with the 36FG

Media buttons. Yes, they are gimmicky, but I use them quite often to fire up exaile

The Harman Kardon built in speakers. They sound so good in M300, I rarely hooked the laptop to my creative desktop speakers. By comparison, the 36FG built-in speakers are.. well.. underwhelming

FireWire port, USB just sucks for large external storage such as My MyBook 1TB external HDD

..And what I missed the most is the sensible port placement of the M300. The 36FG headphone jack is placed at the front, which will make the wire of my HD202 fall under my desk 😦 hate that. And it gets even more annoying when I have to plug in my desktop speaker, since the cable has to travel way around to the front 😦

… Did I mention that I don’t like chiclet keyboard?

What works out of the box:

Networks, wired, wireless. My decision of purchasing the 36FG is based on my research that it uses intel chip for wireless 🙂

Bluetooth

SD Card reader, I haven’t tried the memory stick slot

The ATI HD5650. It was a standard fare of activating the proprietary driver from System>Administration>Hardware Drivers

eSATA

Hibernation. Yay! 😀

oh, and the Webcam

Not yet tested:

HDMI port,

Intel Turbo Boost

Not working out of the box:

Touchpad. But if you can get it to work, it’s great

Sound. This is a common issue with Intel HD sound chip. Meh 😦

The Fn+Fx combos for brightness adjustment don’t work

The installation of Lucid is of course straight forward. As soon as I’m in the Live CD I noticed that the touchpad didn’t work at all. Slapped my wireless Microsoft (blargh), and went ahead with installation. 30 minutes later, I was presented with a familiar login screen. Still no touchpad.

Touchpad

To get the touchpad working, you need to fire up your choice of text editor,

Update: Sometimes, the script failed to work when it was loaded before some other service from my startup app list. So I add a 20s delay on the script. Set the script to be executable, by opening a terminal window, and type:

surfer@m5-m3:~$ chmod 755 /home/surfer/.scripts/touchpad.sh

To get two finger scrolling works right away, just execute the script. Press Alt+F2, click on the “Run With File” button, and browse to your script (the .scripts directory is hidden, so you’ll need to right click anywhere on the newly opened window, and check the “show hidden file” option), and then press run. To get it to work on automatically, set the script to be executed at login. Go to System>Preferences>Startup Applications. Press Add, name the startup program, click browse, and find your script. Click save, and make sure it is checked on the list, press Close.

Hai Ikhsan,
Thank you very much for your fast reply
I am using default os windows 7 pre 64bit.and i have install ubuntu 10.10 32 bit inside windows dual os in VPCEA36FG. is it any problem for 64 bit windows and 32 bit ubuntu. and my video also not good some shadows coming please help me. and once any thanks for your form.

I’m also dual booting into Win7 64-bit and Lucid Lynx. The 36FG is equipped with ATI graphic chip, have you tried to install the proprietary driver from ATI?

Connect to the internet, then go to System > Administration > Hardware Drivers. Select the “ATI/AMD proprietary graphics driver” and click on the “activate” button. The driver will be automatically downloaded and installed on your notebook. After the installation process is finished, restart your laptop.

i add your line
but after Press Alt+F2, click on the “Run With File” button, and browsr to my script can’t show .script file so i have create /home/suresh/scripts/touchpad.sh and then press run. i got only my file not run

a file or folder with “.” at the beginning of the name will be hidden by default. After pressing the “run with file” button, you’ll need to right click on the newly opened windows, and check “show hidden files”

there is no changes happend after creating the script for brightnessup and down , the problem for brightness up and down is begins after installing graphis driver, before installing driver function keys are working

To enable desktop effect on your VPCEA36FG, you need to install the proprietary driver from ATI. To do that, make sure your vaio is connected to the internet, and then go to System > Administration > Hardware Drivers. It should list ATI/AMD Proprietary FGLRX graphics driver. Select it, and press the activate button at the bottom of the window. Then it should start downloading the binary driver, and install it to your notebook. It then will ask you to reboot your notebook. Do so.

After the reboot, you’ll be able to enable the desktop effect by going to System > Preferences > Appearance. Go to the visual effect tab, and select normal or extra. To get more granular setup on desktop effect, open synaptic package manager, then search and install simple-ccsm or compizconfig-settings-manager